Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit

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The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit is an argument for the improbability of the existence of God. It was introduced by Richard Dawkins in chapter 4 "Why there almost certainly is no God" of his book The God Delusion. Dawkins offers it as a counter-argument to the modern form of the argument from design.

Contents 1 Context and history of the argument 2 Dawkins's statement of the argument 2.1 Dawkins's response to criticism 3 Assessment and criticism of the argument 3.1 On the simplicity of God and materialist assumptions 3.2 On the necessity of external explanations 4 Notes and references

[edit] Context and history of the argument

Richard Dawkins begins The God Delusion by making it clear that the God he talks about is the Abrahamic concept of a personal God who is susceptible to worship. He considers the existence of such an entity to be a scientific question, because a universe with such a God would be significantly different from a universe without one, and he says that the difference would be empirically discernible. Therefore, Dawkins concludes, the same kind of rational reasoning can be applied to the God Hypothesis as to any other scientific question.

After discussing the most common arguments for the existence of God in chapter 3, Dawkins concludes that the argument from design is the most convincing. The extreme improbability of life and a universe capable of hosting it requires explanation, but Dawkins considers the God Hypothesis inferior to evolution by natural selection as explanations for the complexity of life. As part of his efforts to refute intelligent design creationism, he redirects the argument from complexity in an attempt to show that God must have been designed by a superintelligent designer, and then goes on to present his probabilistic argument against the existence of God.^[1]

Dawkins's name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. This is an allusion to Fred Hoyle who reportedly stated that the "probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747."^[2] The basic argument against empirical theism dates back at least to David Hume, whose objection can be popularly stated as "Who designed the designer?", but according to Daniel Dennett the innovation of Dawkins's argument is, first, to show that where design fails to explain complexity, evolution by natural selection succeeds and is the only workable solution, and, second, to argue how this should illuminate the confusion surrounding the anthropic principle.^[3]

[edit] Dawkins's statement of the argument

Dawkins summarizes his argument as follows.^[4] The references to "crane" and "skyhook" are ideas from Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane" not a "skyhook," for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.
5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.
6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

A central thesis of the argument is that evolution by natural selection is a simpler and more parsimonious explanation of the complexity observed in the biosphere than the God Hypothesis. He cites a paragraph where Richard Swinburne reasons that theism is parsimonious because it only invokes a single substance, God, as a cause and maintainer of every other object. This cause is seen as omnipotent, omniscient and totally free. Dawkins believes postulating such an entity doesn't explain anything and usurps the role of science.^[5] He suggests that a God that controls every atom and listens to all our prayers cannot be something simple, and his existence would require a "mammoth explanation" of its own.^[5]

Dawkins then turns to a discussion of Keith Ward's views on divine simplicity to show the difficulty "the theological mind has in grasping where the complexity of life comes from." Dawkins writes that Ward is sceptical of Arthur Peacocke's ideas that evolution is directed by other forces than only natural selection and that these processes may have a propensity toward increasing complexity. Dawkins says that this scepticism is justified, because complexity doesn't come from biased mutations. Dawkins writes:

[Natural selection], as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity. The theory of natural selection is genuinely simple. So is the origin from which it starts. That which it explains, on the other hand, is complex almost beyond telling: more complex than anything we can imagine, save a God capable of designing it.^[6]

[edit] Dawkins's response to criticism

Dawkins writes about his attendance at a conference in Cambridge sponsored by the Templeton Foundation,^[6] where he challenged the theologians present to respond to the argument that a creator of a universe with such complexity would have to be complex and improbable.^[7] According to Dawkins, the strongest response was the objection that he was imposing a scientific epistemology on a question that lies beyond the realm of science. When theologians hold God to be simple, who is a scientist like Dawkins "to dictate to theologians that their God had to be complex?"^[8] Dawkins writes that he didn't get the impression that those employing this "evasive" defence were being wilfully dishonest, but were "defining themselves into an epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach them because they had declared by fiat that it could not."^[8]

The theologians, he writes, demanded that there must be a first cause, which can be given the name God. Dawkins responds that it must have been a simple cause, and he contends that God is not an appropriate name for it, unless God is divested of its normal associations. Dawkins wants the first cause to be a "self-bootstrapping crane" that slowly lifts the world to its current complexity. Postulating a prime mover that is capable of indulging in intelligent design is in Dawkins' opinion "a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation." He says that he doesn't require a narrowly scientistic explanation, but what any honest theory that accounts for the complex phenomena of the natural world requires is a crane and not a skyhook.^[9]

[edit] Assessment and criticism of the argument

The argument was criticised by most reviewers of the book. Theist authors have presented extensive refutations, most notably by theologian Alister McGrath in the The Dawkins Delusion?, and philosophers Alvin Plantinga^[10] and Richard Swinburne.^[11] With the exception of Daniel Dennett,^[3] many atheists have stated that they are not impressed by the argument, most notably physicist Lawrence M. Krauss,^[12] biologist and critic of intelligent design H. Allen Orr,^[13] and atheist philosopher of religion Graham Oppy.^[14] The review by Allen Orr has generated a certain irritation within atheist circles. Norman Levitt doesn't appreciate the need to defend religion, asking why theologians are assumed to have the exclusive right to write about who "rules" the universe.^[15] Daniel Dennett also took exception to Orr's review and they had an exchange of open letters.^[16]

Criticism has centred around two main points, one can either reject Dawkins's view that God is complex, or one can accept that God is complex, but reject the demand that there has to be some external explanation for this complexity.^[17]

[edit] On the simplicity of God and materialist assumptions

Both Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne raise the objections that God is not complex. Swinburne gives two reasons why a God that controls every particle can be simple. First, he writes that a person is not the same as his brain, and he points to split-brain experiments that he has discussed in his previous work, thus he argues that a simple entity like our self can control our brain, which is a very complex thing. Second, he argues that simplicity is a quality that is intrinsic to a hypothesis, and not related to its empirical consequences.^[11]

Plantinga cites Dawkins's definition from the The Blind Watchmaker that something is complex when it has parts that are arranged in way that's unlikely to happen by chance. He argues that since God is a spirit and not a material object, He has no parts, and is simple by Dawkins's own definition. Dawkins is therefore assuming materialism, Plantinga argues, and since it immediately follows from materialism that God does not exist, he considers the argument to be question begging.^[10]

[edit] On the necessity of external explanations

There are many variations on how to express this objection. Allen Orr writes that just because a hypothesis seems unsatisfactory to a scientist and fails to provide an explanation outside itself, it does not settle the truth-value of the issue. He says that the kinds of explanation that one finds satisfying is a subjective matter that "says more about us than about the explanations", so he asks why Dawkins is not troubled by the assumptions that the scientist is making, namely that matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given, and why is this not seen as equally question-begging?^[13]

William F. Vallicella holds that organized complexity as such does not need explanation, because when in search of an ultimate explanation, one must in the end accept an entity whose complexity has no external explanation.^[17] And Plantinga writes that when not in search for an ultimate explanation of organized complexity, it is perfectly fine to explain one kind of complexity, that of terrestrial life, in terms of another kind of complexity, namely divine activity.^[10]

Alister McGrath suggests that the leap from the recognition of complexity to the assertion of improbability is problematic, as a theory of everything would be more complex than the theories it would replace, yet one would not conclude that it is less probable. He then argues that probability is not relevant to the question of existence: life on earth is highly improbable, and yet we do exist. The important question in his view is not whether God is probable, but whether God is actual.^[18] On the point of probability, Alvin Plantinga says that since according to classical theism, God is a necessary being, He is by definition maximally probable, and thus to show the improbability of God, one has to present an argument showing that there is no necessary being with the qualities attributed to God.^[10]

[edit] Notes and references